1. Field of Art
The present disclosure is directed to determining the degree of influence users have on each other based on their interactions.
2. Description of Related Art
With the changing trend in the use of World Wide Web technology that aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and, most notably, collaboration among users, there has been an evolution of web-based communities and hosted services in the form of social media. Social media is an umbrella term for activities that enable people to interlink and interact with engaging content in a conversational and participatory manner via the Internet. In essence, social media is used to describe how people socialize or interact with each other throughout the World Wide Web.
Social media include social networks where users build profiles and friend lists, photo sharing websites, instant messaging applications, web-based email, retail sites where users can share wish lists, wedding planning sites that allow users to create personalized pages to share information about a wedding with guests, and combinations of several of these. Some social media, including social networks, have created open platforms so that external developers can write applications that use data captured by social media.
Advertising on the internet conventionally maximizes the effective cost per thousand impressions (eCPM) where each ad has some bid, eCPM (e.g., a calculation that reveals how much each thousand units of an advertisement inventory costs an advertiser such as campaign cost divided by number of thousand advertisement units). The ranking of advertising is computed by multiplying bid eCPM's by quality scores. The ads with the highest ad rank are given preferential treatment. In the case of advertising opportunities where only one ad is displayed, preferential treatment means the highest rank ad is displayed more often than lower ranking ads. In a situation where multiple ads are displayed, preferential treatment means the ad is displayed more prominently than the others.
Currently, various applications allow for users to invite their friends on a social network to participate in the application and interact with their friends through that application. All of this information is logged by the social network. Advertisements are displayed to users of social networks but are only conventional internet advertisements.